Series guide
Modern European History
Thirty articles trace modern Europe from the world before 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Read through five periods, or choose an article directly.
Revolution and Restoration
1789–1830
- Europe Before 1789: What Was the Ancien Régime?
- Why Did the French Revolution Begin?
- Whom Did the “Rights of Man” Actually Include?
- Why Did the French Revolution Enter the Terror?
- Was Napoleon the Heir or the Enemy of the Revolution?
- How Did the Congress of Vienna Rebuild Europe?
- Why Did Liberalism Threaten Restoration Europe?
Industrialisation, Romanticism and 1848
1780s–1848
- How Did Industrialisation Change Time, Labour and Everyday Life?
- Why Did Romanticism Rebel Against a World of Reason Alone?
- How Did the Revolutions of 1830 Shake Restoration Europe?
- How Did Nationalism Turn Culture into Politics?
- Why Did the Revolutions of 1848 Sweep Europe and Then Fail?
- How Did the “Social Question” Create Socialism?
- How Did Marx Reinterpret History, Class and Capitalism?
War, Unification and Intellectual Change
1853–1871
- How Did the Crimean War Break the Concert of Europe?
- Was Italian Unification National Liberation or Dynastic Conquest?
- How Did Bismarck Unify Germany Through War and Compromise?
- Why Did the Paris Commune Terrify Europe?
- Why Did Darwinian Evolution Challenge the Nineteenth-Century World?
- What Did Liberalism, Conservatism and Socialism Contest?
Mass Politics, Rights and Imperial Expansion
1870s–1900
- How Did Railways, Telegraphy and the Mass Press Remake Public Life?
- How Did Nineteenth-Century Women's Movements Make the Private Political?
- Did Expanded Suffrage Truly Create Democracy?
- Why Did the “New Imperialism” Accelerate in the Late Nineteenth Century?
- How Did Antisemitism Become Modern Politics?
Imperial Crises and 1914
1878–1914